From the archive: Both victims of duck-boat accident found

This story was originally published on July 10, 2010.

THEY TOUCHED down at JFK Airport about 2 p.m. on July 2 to begin their "American adventure," eager to learn all they could about our culture before returning to Hungary in three weeks.

Among the items on their packed itinerary was a trip to Nyack, N.Y., where the group of 13 students and two teachers was scheduled to go rowing on the Hudson River.

Instead, they were thrown into the Delaware River Wednesday afternoon, when a 250-foot sludge barge owned by the city plowed over an amphibious sightseeing boat that had stalled.

Two Hungarians in the front of the Ride the Ducks boat, Dora Schwendtner, 16, and Szabolcs "Szeb" Prem, 20, didn't surface with the rest.

Police confirmed yesterday what everybody from Philadelphia to Budapest had reluctantly come to accept: They were dead.

About 4:30 a.m., a fisherman reported a body floating off Pier 80, near Snyder Avenue, about a mile south of where the crash occurred. It was that of Schwendtner. Police recovered Prem's body shortly after 3 p.m., when it surfaced after the submerged Duck boat was pulled from the river.

The surviving Hungarians, who were staying with members of the Marshallton United Methodist Church in West Chester, have been living in a "world of grief" since the accident, according to John Oostdyk, director of Atlantic Bridge, the Christian organization that arranged the trip.

He described the ordeal as a "story of devastating sadness."

"The first evening, they all sat around the table and hardly a word was spoken," Oostdyk wrote on Atlantic Bridge's Web site. By Thursday, he wrote, "the students were starting to talk and open up, relaying their stories to each other" and praying for "their two lost friends." Then, the Coast Guard suspended its search, announcing that Schwendtner and Prem could not have survived.

"Although expected, that news was the most defeating moment of the day," Oostdyk wrote.

The group will return home within the next few days, said Eszter Pataki, spokeswoman for the Hungarian Foreign Ministry.

"As a private individual, I feel deeply saddened for the [victims'] families and friends," Pataki said. "It was supposed to be the trip of a lifetime."

In Hungary, a candlelight vigil in memory of Schwendtner and Prem is scheduled for tonight in Mosonmagyaróvár, near the Austrian border. A private memorial is planned this morning at the Independence Seaport Museum at Penn's Landing.

Schwendtner was a "really, really smart girl," a social-networking butterfly who attended Kossuth Lajos High School, according to Anna Gyulai Gaal, a reporter for the Hungarian newspaper Bors. She said Schwendtner's family had given up hope for her survival before her body was found. As the barge closed in Wednesday, a teacher on the Duck boat had called a family member to report that "another boat was coming toward them," Gyulai Gaal said.

"They thought the boat would stop before them," she said. "They didn't think anything disastrous would happen.

"That's probably why some of the people didn't wear the life jackets," Gyulai Gall said. "They didn't think that they would crash."

Staff writer Michelle Skowronek con-tributed to this report.